Fall means the arrival of pumpkin, but some chefs are turning away from the overload of the orange vegetable and embracing other seasonal flavors.In Oakland, California, at the newly opened Oaxacan restaurant Agave Uptown, a fall lineup of flavors highlights produce that Chef Octavio Diaz receives directly from Oaxaca, Mexico, and his local farm in Healdsburg, California.

For the past three decades, Consolidated Restaurant Operations (CRO) has worked to expand Cantina Laredo, its Texas-based, modern Mexican brand, across the world. CRO currently operates 39 of the upscale restaurants, but significant expansion plans for the brand lie on the horizon.

The crisp autumn air. The earth-tone foliage. And the season’s most popular fruit. With the apple harvest comes a season for putting the resurgence in American cider-making front and center on any table, and a handful of restaurants or cider-centric public houses are at the forefront of this movement.

After ascending to general manager of Chef Thomas Keller’s acclaimed New York City restaurant Per Se in 2009, former maître d’ Anthony Rudolf was learning on the job. “I knew how to run the dining room and I knew how to run service, but from a financial standpoint I did not know how to run the business,” recalls Rudolf, who felt fortunate to have a support system that allowed him to learn.

At Zazu Kitchen + Farm, one of the restaurant tenants in The Barlow—a foodie-focused neighborhood respite in Sebastopol, California, which opened in 2013—owners Duskie Estes and John Stewart source most of the products on the menu from their own farm, MacBryde Farm in nearby Forestville.

College campuses are prime markets for full-service restaurants. Whether it’s dawn, midnight, or somewhere in between on game day, hordes of loyal students can turn a successful operation into a landmark as visible as the university itself.

When Aubrey Good and Doug Rogers opened the first Cheddar’s Casual Café in 1979, they never considered serving guests anything but scratch-made meals. For the past 37 years, the brand has prioritized preparing dishes the “right way,” versus the “easy way.

In June, five of the top Bay Area chefs collaborated on a “Waste Not, Want Not” dinner, held at The Perennial in San Francisco. Organized by the Natural Resources Defense Council (nrdc), the benefit had a two-fold goal: to raise money and to showcase a stellar meal made largely using leftover foods.

There are times when Chef John Franke will glance around his restaurant and see a table of four sharing 20 glasses of wine. There might be five, perhaps six appetizers, with more on the way. Does this sound like a concept geared toward millennials or high rollers with bottomless bank accounts?Welcome to the evolving world of wine on tap in the 21st century.

Let me start off by saying this is not a political soapbox article. I don’t care what side of the political fence you live on, my goal is to teach you the one thing you need to learn to survive the minimum wage increases that are gaining momentum all across the U.

The NoMad hotel in the heart of New York City has roughly 100 kitchen employees, including line cooks, 15 sous chefs, and managers at different kitchen levels. The NoMad’s executive chef, James Kent, and chef de cuisine, Brian Lockwood, talk about opportunities to challenge and inspire young chefs in their restaurant settings and in competitions.

The fact Chef Thomas Lents majored in philosophy won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has sampled his cuisine. In the past four years since taking the reins at Sixteen, the Michelin two-star restaurant in Chicago’s Trump International Hotel & Tower, Lents’ menu has displayed a narrative and ingenuity worthy of a master storyteller.

What do Gordon Ramsay, Scott Conant, and Michael Symon all have in common? Failure. High-profile failures of restaurant ventures by all three prove that, even for celebrity chefs, when it comes to cooking up a business, knife-craft is no match for numerical know-how.

There is plenty to be said regarding the pros and cons of operating an independent restaurant versus a nationally backed franchised. While the debate is too subjective to warrant any real conclusion, US Foods took aim at an obstacle facing single-unit operators who grapple with limited resources on a daily basis.

The minute Tyler Sailsbery—chef/owner of The Black Sheep in Whitewater, Wisconsin—decided to pour local wines, business partnerships started to happen.Suddenly he was hosting chef dinners six times a year at Staller Estate Winery, one of the wineries whose bottles appear on his list.